Stories by

Phoebe Gates

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Harithand: Beirut Eveningwear and Gowns by Harith Hashim

Harithand: Beirut Eveningwear and Gowns by Harith Hashim

Harithand is the Beirut eveningwear house Iraqi-Lebanese designer Harith Hashim founded in 2012. It works on a pret-a-couture model, which means atelier-level dressmaking produced in limited runs rather than one-off commissions. The signature is what Hashim calls the chemistry between body and dress, and it is easy to see where that chemistry happens.

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Alfie Tailoring and Dresses

Alfie Tailoring and Dresses

Alfie is what happens when a design student refuses to sell the postcard version of French style. Alice Fresnel launched the label in Paris in 2020 with deadstock fabric, a five piece collection and no plan beyond seeing how far it went. It grew through pop-ups and word of mouth, and it now reads as the most honest version of Parisian dressing in circulation.

ARAKII: Hanna Schönberg's Sculptural Dresses and Trousers

ARAKII: Hanna Schönberg's Sculptural Dresses and Trousers

ARAKII is the Stockholm label that came out of a stylist's own wardrobe gaps rather than a design house pipeline. Hanna Schonberg spent years as one of Scandinavia's most watched dressers before founding it in the early 2020s and moving the work in house. The result is bold minimalism, which sounds like a contradiction until you see the shoulders.

La Veste

La Veste

The brand began with two friends walking to a show during Paris Fashion Week deciding, more or less on the spot, to start a brand. Stylist Blanca Miro and designer Maria de la Orden founded it in 2018 and named it after the French word for blazer, because at first that was all they intended to make. It is now the most recognisable of the new Spanish labels and still runs on the same instinct.

Ashlyn Tailoring and Knitwear

Ashlyn Tailoring and Knitwear

Ashlyn is a New York label built by a patternmaker rather than a stylist, and the difference is visible in every seam. Ashlynn Park trained in Seoul and Tokyo, won Japan's SO-EN Award, then cut patterns at Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander Wang and Calvin Klein 205W39NYC before founding her own line in 2020. Five years later the Met owns her work and the CFDA named her American Emerging Designer of the Year.

Wiederhoeft Jeans and Dresses

Wiederhoeft Jeans and Dresses

Wiederhoeft treats a fashion show as a piece of theatre, which is exactly what its founder was trained to do. Jackson Wiederhoeft won Women's Designer of the Year at Parsons in 2016, spent three years on women's runway collections at Thom Browne, and launched the label in October 2019 with a ten-look story ballet called Spooky Couture. The press calls them the high priest of corsets made in New York, and the corsetry is genuinely the reason.

Róhe

Róhe

Róhe is named after the Norwegian word for calm and operates out of a seventeenth century canal palace on Amsterdam's Golden Bend. Marieke Meulendijks and Maickel Weyers, a couple who met in a bar in a southern Dutch village in 2000, founded it in 2021 after she had spent years carrying the idea around. It has since become the label people reach for when they have exhausted the obvious quiet luxury options.

FFORME Dresses

FFORME Dresses

FFORME was founded in 2021 by two businesswomen rather than a designer, which is still unusual enough to be worth saying out loud. Nina Khosla and Laura Vazquez hired Paul Helbers, a menswear veteran of Margiela, Louis Vuitton and The Row, and he built the first collection on a sewing machine in Brittany during lockdown. The double F stands for fundamental and foundational, and the brand has never really strayed from that.

Marie Adam-Leenaerdt: The Brussels Designer at Paris Fashion Week

Marie Adam-Leenaerdt: The Brussels Designer at Paris Fashion Week

Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is the Brussels designer who went from La Cambre graduate to Paris Fashion Week fixture in about a year. She trained at Givenchy and Balenciaga under Demna, launched her label in 2023, and was an LVMH Prize and ANDAM finalist by 2024. In July 2026 she won the ANDAM Grand Prize outright.

Amsale Dresses and Bridal

Amsale Dresses and Bridal

Amsale Aberra was born in Addis Ababa, the daughter of an Ethiopian diplomat, studied political science in Boston and then fashion at FIT, and worked as a design assistant at Harvé Benard. Unable to find a simple wedding dress for her own 1985 wedding, she made her own, placed an advertisement in Modern Bride and built a house out of the response.

ALAÏA Shoes and Bags

ALAÏA Shoes and Bags

Azzedine Alaïa trained as a sculptor in Tunis before he ever cut a pattern, and it shows in everything the house has made since. He worked briefly at Dior, then Guy Laroche and Thierry Mugler, opened his own atelier in a Paris apartment on rue de Bellechasse in 1979, and built a body-first vocabulary that the industry has been borrowing ever since.

Andres Otalora

Andres Otalora

Andrés Otálora runs his house out of Cali, where the clothes are made by hand by an atelier of more than fifty women, each of them the head of a family. He came to design sideways, having trained and worked as a business administrator first.

Another Tomorrow Tailoring and Dresses

Another Tomorrow Tailoring and Dresses

Another Tomorrow was founded in 2018 by Vanessa Barboni Hallik, who spent fifteen years at Morgan Stanley and left as a managing director in emerging-markets finance. She built a luxury label around traceable materials and per-garment digital IDs, then went and got a sustainability degree at Columbia to go with the Cornell economics one.

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Andrea Gomez Shoes

Andrea Gomez Shoes

Andrea Gomez studied jewellery design in Florence as a teenager, then at FIT in New York and the London College of Fashion, and worked at DKNY before launching her own shoes. She started in Caracas in 2011 with her sisters Leonor and Mariela, then relaunched the line in New York for spring 2017. Everything is made in a small family-owned factory near Alicante in Spain.

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Agua Bendita: The Colombian Swim Label Born From Factory Scraps

Agua Bendita: The Colombian Swim Label Born From Factory Scraps

Agua Bendita is a Medellin label that began in 2003, when two fashion students started making swimsuits out of factory scraps. I go through the Agua by Agua Bendita dresses, tops, swim and skirts.

Agolde Jeans: Rigid Denim in Every Leg Shape

Agolde Jeans: Rigid Denim in Every Leg Shape

Agolde started in Los Angeles in 1993 as A. Gold E., founded by Adriano Goldschmied and the retailer Ron Herman, and was relaunched in 2014 by Jerome Dahan. This edit covers more than forty jeans, twenty four tops, twenty trousers and shorts, and sixteen jackets, coats and leather pieces.

Altuzarra Dresses and Tailoring

Altuzarra Dresses and Tailoring

Joseph Altuzarra was born in Paris to a French father and a Chinese-American mother, studied art history at Swarthmore, and learned to cut by apprenticing with Nicolas Caïto, who had run the Rochas atelier. He worked at Proenza Schouler and as Riccardo Tisci's first assistant at Givenchy before launching his own label in New York in 2008.

Ashna Mehta Jewelry: The Designer Behind Bag Bijoux

Ashna Mehta Jewelry: The Designer Behind Bag Bijoux

Ashna Mehta is a third-generation diamantaire from the Rosy Blue family, one of the largest diamond manufacturers in the world, and she founded her own jewellery brand in 2022. Her signature is Bag Bijoux, diamond charms engineered to clip onto a Birkin or Kelly and convert into pendants, developed with her sister Aria.

Amina Muaddi Heels and Shoes

Amina Muaddi Heels and Shoes

Amina Muaddi was born in Romania in 1986 to a Jordanian father and a Romanian mother, studied fashion communication at IED in Milan, and worked as an assistant stylist at L'Uomo Vogue, Vogue Italia and American GQ. She then spent a year learning shoemaking from artisans in Riviera del Brenta, co-founded Oscar Tiye, left it, and launched her own label in August 2018.

Anya Hindmarch Bags

Anya Hindmarch Bags

Anya Hindmarch started her label in London in 1987 at nineteen, with no design school behind her, after a year in Florence learning the leather trade from the craftsmen who worked in it. She sold her first five hundred bags through a magazine offer and used the proceeds as start-up capital.

Aliita Jewelry

Aliita Jewelry

Aliita was founded in Milan in 2015 by Cynthia Vilchez Castiglioni, who grew up in Maracaibo in Venezuela and studied fashion marketing at IED before working at Vionnet, Miu Miu and Jil Sander. The name is both an anagram of Italia and a Wayuu word for an important object, after the Guajiro people of Zulia where she was raised.

Alexis Bittar Jewelry

Alexis Bittar Jewelry

Alexis Bittar started selling vintage jewellery on St Mark's Place in Manhattan at about thirteen, and by 1990 was hand-carving Lucite in his one-bedroom apartment with no design training at all. Bergdorf Goodman's fashion director Dawn Mello discovered him in 1992, which is the placement that made the career.

Aisha Baker Jewelry

Aisha Baker Jewelry

Aisha Baker is a Dubai high-jewellery house founded in 2017 by the Emirati entrepreneur Aisha Bakhtiar with the designer Hoonik Chang, who trained in jewellery at Central Saint Martins. The pieces are built as narratives, with fairy-tale and fantasy themes running through collections released in tiny editions.

Annette Ferdinandsen Jewelry

Annette Ferdinandsen Jewelry

Annette Ferdinandsen trained as a sculptor at the Rhode Island School of Design and found jewellery while studying studio art, which is the most useful fact about her work. Her father and grandfather were both model makers for Danish sculptors, so casting and carving are a family inheritance.

Almasika Jewelry

Almasika Jewelry

Catherine Sarr founded Almasika in January 2014 and debuted it at Colette in Paris, after more than a decade in the diamond and fine-jewellery industry including several years at De Beers and at LoveGold. The name joins almasi, Swahili for diamond, with sika, a word for gold across several West African languages.

All Three: New York Shirts, Tops and Trousers to Layer

All Three: New York Shirts, Tops and Trousers to Layer

All Three is a New York label founded by Tal Waksal in 2024, making what it calls evolving essentials: shirts, tops and trousers designed to be layered and worn constantly. It is new enough that the public record is still mostly the clothes themselves.

Armenta Jewelry

Armenta Jewelry

Emily Armenta traded at Morgan Stanley, then wrote the business plan for her jewellery company as a class assignment during her MBA at Rice, and launched it in Houston in 2001. The work is built on mixing oxidised silver with gold and setting micromosaics, ancient beads and enamel patinas into it.

Ay Que Calor Swim: Colombian Resortwear by Maygel Coronel

Ay Que Calor Swim: Colombian Resortwear by Maygel Coronel

Ay Que Calor swim is Colombian resortwear designed by Maygel Coronel, from halter triangle tops to ruched strapless shapes. I start with the swim, then go through the tops, skirts and dresses.